JOACHIM NORDWALL

Healing Music

Genre: ELECTRONIC

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Boomkat Product Review:

Severely desiccated dub wreckage from iDEAL boss Joachim Nordwall, pushing the aesthetics and tekkerz of his records as The iDEALIST to extreme degrees comparable with Ilpo Väisänen’s Kangaroo turns, starkest Rhythm & Sound joints or the most uncompromising gear found on SM-LL

A big look for noise and industrial dub fiends, ‘Healing Music’ wounds and sutures heads in six spirit-grinding works defined by an obsessive sound sensitivity toward subbass and worn-out texture. We’ve heard artists explore this zone before, yet rarely to this kind of unyielding extent, where the principles of dub are factored by the industrial mindset into intensely sparse negative space. It’s a logical next step on from Nordwall’s work as The iDEALIST, effectively cutting the kick drum anchors to leave behind trace elements and after-impressions of dematerialised rhythms and sounds.

Frankly it’s a sound we could happily run all day, requiring little effort on behalf of the listener, yet helplessly snagging us in its spectral slosh and a sort of illusive ephemerality that leads yr mind off into space. While patently hard-bitten, there is a subtle declension of rawness and sensuality at play in the album’s arc from slow, seething scree of its first part thru the relative airborne lightness of its last. In between he opens fathoms of seductively gritty imaginary space, descending subs of ‘Healing Music 2’ and extreme high/low register tones of ‘Healing Music 3’, into empty-belly echo chamber resonance of ‘Healing Music 4’, and settling near Nate Young’s ‘Regression’ session styles on ‘Healing Music 5’.

MP3 Release (6)